Living organ donors sought for Upper Gwynedd, Philadelphia men

Eric Miller, center, with his parents, Joan and Pat, at right, brother Scott and nephew Justin are seen with one of the lawn signs for Eric they put in front of their home in Upper Gwynedd on Tuesday October 15,2013. Photo by Mark C Psoras

Born with only 8 percent kidney function, and not expected to survive nearly as long as he has, Eric Miller, 34, is hoping someone out there is able to donate one of their kidneys, in the event that the kidney that has cleaned his blood for the last five years fails.

The 1999 North Penn graduate worked until 2009, when a bout with the shingles virus almost took his life.

The treatment for shingles resulted in damage to Miller’s kidney, which had been given as a living organ donation by a Naval veteran from Washington state. Miller’s mother, Joan, said that specialists at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore have advised the family to start looking for another donor. Joan Miller gave one of her kidneys to Eric in 1990, which was replaced after it began to fail. Miller’s father, Pat, and older brother, Scott, are not compatible donors.

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After numerous hospitalizations, some dialysis, taking a staggering amount of medication, and monitoring his blood pressure several times a day, Miller’s condition has stabilized, Joan Miller said. But her son is still very much in danger of dying of kidney failure.

“It could be a year; it could be three months,” she said.

“I don’t think people know that they can (have an) impact (somebody’s life). You only need 50 percent of one kidney, so you’re given 200 percent,” she said in a phone interview in an effort to raise kidney donation awareness. She’s also spreading the word via www.facebook.com/KidneyQuest.

Living donations, according to the National Kidney Foundation , resulted in more than 5,700 transplants in the U.S. last year.

Potential donors have to undergo a multiple-step screening process that takes at least three months.

In Miller’s case, his match would need to have blood types of A+ or O and have not have a certain antibody that would cause organ rejection.

According to Joan Miller, there are eight potential donors being screened right now, but even a near-match is “like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“He’s a fighter, to say the least,” Scott Miller said of his brother.

Another possibility that could save the day is a national paired kidney exchange program. Patients with a donor whose kidney turns out to be incompatable due to blood type can swap with another donor/patient pair on the registry. There are several of these programs out there, said Jim Gleason of the Philadelphia chapter of the Transplant Recipients International Organization, so he advised contacting a kidney specialist or social worker to get started.

“We’re at a point where anything we can get is a help,” said Scott Miller, who has launched the website www.kidneyquest.com, the Twitter account @kidneyquest and the Google+ “Kidney Quest — Joan Miller” page.

Although Miller is facing what his family describes as slim odds of finding another compatible kidney, a successful third transplant has happened before, said Mary Elizabeth Sullivan, development manager with the National Kidney Foundation’s Delaware Valley office in Philadelphia.

“We have a lot of stories at the NKF that continue to amaze me,” she said.

However, according to the NKF, as of June 21, there were more than 118,000 Americans waiting for organ transplants in general — more than 96,000 of those were for a kidney. Nearly 3,000 new patients are added to the kidney waiting list each month and 13 people die every day waiting for a transplant, the foundation’s website said.

Philadelphia resident Michael Faruolo, 36, also needs a new kidney. He undergoes dialysis three times a week because of polycystic kidney disease, a genetic disorder that claimed the life of his mother.

“I’ve been on dialysis for 10-11 months now. It’s not so much painful; it just takes a lot out of you. I’ve been on a waiting list for a kidney for a year and a half,” he said.

Although Faruolo initially became depressed by the daunting task of battling kidney disease while finding a transplant donor, he realized that he’s otherwise “in pretty decent health.” He works as a waiter four nights a week, is taking classes at Community College of Philadelphia and does volunteer work.

“I found the best thing that I could do is keeping active,” he said.

Volunteering to be an organ donor when you renew your driver’s license helps. The NKF said that last year, more than 16,000 kidney transplants took place in the U.S., with more than 11,000 of those coming from deceased donors. But according to Sullivan, kidneys from living donors “tend to last longer.”

If you’re considering becoming a living kidney donor, the first step is to ask your doctor, Sullivan said, because if you’re diabetic, have high blood pressure or a family history of kidney disease, it’s likely to rule you out.